That was IAC, not GarageGames. This company bought GG and renamed the sub-company Torque, jacked up prices and devoured souls. I'm sure the CEO also ate babies, but I have no picture evidence. People close to the company can testify this is the sort of thing they would do, though.

I have more hope for the engines now than the IAC days, especially after having seen the improvements on the 2D side. There is still much work left, but people who are really interested in more platforms (like Android) are free to contribute. Please somebody start on Android ports of both engines so the whine can stop ;)

I don't buy music software from people who do regional pricing AND awful DRM ;)

Ableton give me dollar prices (and dual-platform licenses!), PreSonus show local currency at the current exchange rate. Apple charge US prices+VAT for Logic, and recalculate the tier prices on their app stores now and then. I don't recommend supporting a company which charges such wildly different prices in different regions. There's no one company with a choke hold on DAWs :)

Steam is generally good, but I've just stopped supporting regional pricing there. Valve's own aren't so bad, but they're not exactly releasing new titles frequently. I'm using skeevy game key sites for bigger games. ShopTo also have a few Steam games in their download section, at much more reasonable prices than Steam itself.

TV? I haven't used a real TV in over a decade. It's been all torrents and proxies for other services. Netflix is fairly acceptable once it thinks you're in the US, and the same services that enable this make many previously locked websites suddenly available :)

As long as people are being treated differently they'll be using methods illegal or in the grey zone to get content. The big media companies need to do something about licensing procedures, since it clearly is too hard now. Over a year of negotiations to add another country? HBO Nordic delayed by several months already? Not even when they own all their content is it possible to add a region. Or even a single country. I don't think the problem is technical.

Both questions would have to be really hard!

Everything already existing hasn't been ported, but I've definitely noticed a rise in games with Windows/OS X simultaneous launch on Steam. Every game doesn't get a port, but the ones which do at least get them sooner. But OS X probably has ~15x as many desktop users as the various Linux distros, so it might not be that awesome for Linux. We can be certain the indies won't have any reservations now, though. Unity3D is huge among them, and the Linux client export is a first-class feature, like the OS X and Windows players.

Unity definitely had a shaky launch. There is much hatred for it, whether it's warranted anymore or not.

Ubuntu's driver issues aren't purely a Linux kernel issue (although it might be in some cases), because they have their own installers to detect what drivers should be downloaded/installed.

The one thing I've always had issues with was sound. Not directly drivers, but in the past PulseAudio was a pain to keep working. This was mostly fine for about 5 years, before the 2010 editions broke things for me on the desktop again. I've had a much more pleasant desktop experience once things are installed properly in a VM. Using VM auto-installers always left me with really broken locale/keymap settings, and manual installations still give me a US keyboard layout during layout, which is bloody useless for the majority of the world.

It's all fixable, but sometimes searching for the solution will give you conflicting threads. It helps knowing how it all works in the background. I'd say Ubuntu was easier to install and use than Windows at some point (several years, in fact), but the quality of the installer has dropped lately. Internationalisation issues, sound and possibly older hardware are the weak points suddenly. Linux has historically been the best solution to squeeze new life out of old gear, so this is a sad development.

If you're installing a server version of any distro, you'll rarely have any issues at all. Of course, if you are doing that you hopefully have the knowledge to sort out the few issues that could crop up ;)

I'll typically start with just a bare server version of Ubuntu for a new computer, then apt-get the desktop environment+package manager frontends I like (both command line and GUI) once I have it recognising the sound hardware. But you shouldn't have to :/

How many readers and believers now compared to the early days, though? ;)

Games with ads have them even if you have a Gold subscription. The ad posters in Rainbow Six:Vegas are an example. You can't play it online without Gold, but the ads keep coming. Netflix have a proper fullscreen client, I believe, so the only ads are for other Netflix movies and shows. But ads == recommendations there, and you chose to have them. But I only use the PS3 nowadays; I escaped from the 360 when the buttons for my games shrank and the ads grew.

It's not the money for most. The OS is still rather new, and companies don't jump at new systems right at launch. It can take years - they're still migrating from XP to 7!

They just required newer than Snow Leopard. I'm still on Lion. Apple support the two most recent OS versions.

But Michio Kaku is religious. Why would a deist not want to emulate him?

Mother Teresa is known for stuffing the suffering into flophouses to let them suffer. She didn't actually believe in helping people.
A nice summary here: http://www.population-security.org/swom-96-09.htm

They increased the storage by a lot - previous generation's low-end model remains at the lowest price point. So $299 will presumably get you either a music player/PDA with lots of storage, or a 7.85" tablet with some storage.

Or, put simply: Puppet.

Large-scale operations around the world run their clusters of servers/VMs managed by puppetd and version control. Test in the dev environment, check out to production when happy and push changes to all the slaves.

At least there's this:
"Apps that offer routing information, such as turn-by-turn navigation services, can now register as a routing app and make those services available to the entire system."

Since iOS 5 they've added many little features for developers to integrate their apps more with other apps (see the results in apps like AudioBus). Hoping a full Maps replacement becomes possible too.